How to step through a script in CRON?

Question

PHP

Good afternoon,
I am uploading data to the site database from a third-party resource.
Unloading must be done periodically.
Sometimes the amount of data transferred is very large.
The unloading algorithm is as follows:
1. Request to the service API, writes data to a temporary file on the server. Next, we work with the file.
2. Upon successful entry of each element into the database, the element is removed from the file's data array.
3. question: how to interrupt the execution of a script launched by cron for a while, and then start reading this file further?
If I do a recursive run of the import via exec every N steps, would that help?
Thank you.

Answer 1

You can write the current time to a file / database when the script ends. And at each start, read this time, and if enough has passed, then start, otherwise exit. If I understand the question correctly.
If the script should just pause for a while during execution, then sleep can help.

Answer 2

how to stop script execution

You don't have to do this.